


the fundamentals of death

by blueparacosm



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Afterlife, Angst, Canon Related, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Death, Dark Comedy, Ghost Murphy, Guilt, Haunted Bellamy, Haunting, Humor, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Mild Gore, Murphy is a Little Shit, Poltergeists, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Vignette, memory sharing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-15
Updated: 2018-01-15
Packaged: 2019-03-05 07:55:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,366
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13383483
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blueparacosm/pseuds/blueparacosm
Summary: “Ghosts have unfinished business,” he says matter-of-factly, and picks at his teeth with a fingernail even though he hasn’t eaten and will never eat again. Force of habit. “Everyone knows that.”Bellamy clenches his jaw on the other side, sitting hunched over on a crate across the tent, as far away as possible. Murphy’s sprawled out over mats and furs like he owns the place, head propped up on a very pale hand as he lies like Rose DeWitt Bukater and expects to be drawn like one of Bellamy’s French ghouls.“What’s yours?” Bellamy says, voice hoarse from disuse. Or screaming like a little girl. The former sounds better.The poltergeist chuckles. “Trying to get rid of me already? All you men are the same.”





	the fundamentals of death

**Author's Note:**

> [TW FOR BLOOD, CORPSES, VIOLENCE, MURDER, DEATH, GUILT, GRIEF, SUICIDE, HYSTERIA AND A VAGUE MENTION OF ABUSE. All relatively non-graphic and short-lived, but tread lightly. This story is lighter than it sounds, I promise. Kind of.]
> 
> cold moon by the zolas is a good song to have on repeat while u read this if ur someone who's into the whole mood crafting thing. or superorganism but u gotta be able to hear three thousand different sound effects and read at the same time
> 
> enjoy my good folk

 

He thought it peculiar how much he knew of airlocks and guns and knives and bullets and bombs and nooses and graves and-- breathe, breathe, remember to breathe-- how little he was familiar with the real fundamentals of death.

_Thunk!_

The body lands in the body-shaped peg hole in the Earth with a crack of already-broken bone and a mushroom cloud of red dirt. Bellamy feels bile stick its little white hands up his throat, feels his eyes threaten to roll back in his head at the sound. His gaze snaps down to John Murphy’s corpse lying in a crumpled heap about six feet down in the ground, red rope still circling his throat like a fashionable scarf.

“Now why the hell would you do that?” he hisses, grits his teeth and listens for the sound of little grains of salty earth grinding against his molars. Breathe, breathe, remember to breathe.

Dax scratches his cheek, scuffing at the grass with his spade, and shrugs. “Was I supposed to tuck him in, or what?”

It feels good when his cheekbone crunches a little bit under Bellamy’s knuckles. It feels real, real good. He catches a fistful of dirty hair between his fingers when Dax tries to charge like a bull, imagines shouting “Toro! Toro!” and sending him crashing horns and all into the pit.

The older man kicks him in the ass, the toe of his boot nudging him by the place where the sun don’t shine in the direction of camp. “Get the hell out of here,” he orders, solemn, his voice lacking malice to even his own ears. “I got this."

Bellamy turns himself towards the open grave, peers down into the hole again like a child picking a scab and watching their own blood bubble out. Little white hands. Little white hands.

He drops to the edge of the hole and buries his face between his knees.

“I don’t got this.”

Maybe if he just waits, right? Maybe he can wait and see. Wait and see if he wakes up and the whole thing was just a bad dream and Murphy’s stomping around in his clunky boots in the morning, hooting and hollering, trying to get someone to kiss his dirty, loud mouth. See if Murphy’s alive.

He opens his eyes and stares down into the grave. Little white hands.

The wind is warm where it touches his ankles and hikes up his calf. It almost feels like the palm of a child exploring the fabric, lingers before it brushes off and sinks, tousles a bit of Murphy’s dirt-caked hair curiously, adjusts his jacket like a mother straightening wrinkles... spills a little bit of dirt onto the corpse’s chest...-

“Wh-!”

Bellamy leans back on his hands, plucking his dangling legs out of the grave and tucks them close to his body-- _ptptptptpt._

More dirt sprinkles down from the pile at the head of the grave. _Ptptptptpt,_ it says again. It whispers that, as it falls. Bellamy crawls back, crab-walking across the grass, away. Breathe! Breathe! Oh God oh God _oh God_ \-- remember to _breathe!_

The spade shifts, too little to be an animal, too much to be the breeze. Oh, oh-- _“Fuck!”_

 _Clang!_ The spade falls into the grave and lands on the corpse’s face, distorting Murphy’s choked, swollen features even further. Bellamy feels tears springing to his eyes. What the fuck, what the fuck, what the fu-

“Agh,” the wind says. Oh God. “Shit.”

Bellamy points his own shovel at the dirt crumbling off of the edges of the grave. “Stay back!” he shouts into the wind, and more dirt tumbles down. _Ptptptptpt._

“Little help here,” the wind whispers. It’s such a soft voice; weak, confused. It’s almost sweet. Bellamy does not like that shit at all.

Fingers. There are fingers on the edge of the grave. Faint, pale. Translucent almost. Little white hands.

Bellamy stops scuttling backwards, holds his breath and feels completely justified in doing so. Remember to br- _not now, Christ._

“Can you hear me?” the wind says, still sounding small, while Bellamy watches the fingers claw at the dirt.

He gulps. “I think so.”

A pause, and then a laugh. It rings around the little clearing like a smothered bell. It’s gruff, thick. Hoarse yet nasal. It’s familiar.

“How convenient,” it says, a little stronger now. Surer. A little more human-like, less wind-ish. “Mind giving me a hand, boss?”

Bellamy’s blood freezes, his skin turns blue with hypoxia, oh God, he must be dying. He can’t breathe. Not a breath. Not one fucking breath.

“M-” it sticks. He swallows the letter, spits out something that resembles a name.

“Murphy?”

The wind whips a little, tosses Bellamy’s clothes and hair, tousles the leaf litter-- it feels happy. Amused. The little white hands fall down.

“Bellamy,” it answers simply.

 

* * *

 

“Is this- what is this?”

He keeps his eyes trained on the spade at the poltergeist’s feet, resting against the corpse’s forehead. He can’t bear to meet the barely-there blue eyes, blinking up at him curiously, glimmering sharp and translucent like cut diamonds.

“I believe they’re calling them shovels now.”

Bellamy’s face twists up in an involuntarily expression of disgust and irritation. “No-” he tenses up and wields his spade menacingly again, pointing it at the space between not-Murphy’s eyes. “Is this some kind of fucked up joke? What the hell is happening?” He can hear his voice trembling, feels his knees wobbling cartoonishly, senses his eyes bulging out of his head like he has elephantitis. He can’t bring himself to be embarrassed by the display.

Not-Murphy grabs hold of what grass he can reach and winces, trying to walk himself up the crumbling side of the grave. Bellamy frowns as the ghost tap dances carelessly all over his own body in an effort to pull himself out of the hole. Murphy’s corpse is already nearly unrecognizable, bruised and bloody from head to toe, head bashed in by a fallen spade, mouth filling up progressively with more and more dirt. A wave of nausea hits Bellamy all at once and he backs away, far away. He needs to sit down.

“Oh, don’t be so sensitive,” Not-Murphy advises, grunting between words as he tries and fails to heave himself over the little ledge. “I’m not using it.” He gestures flippantly to the body he’s stomping all over, and Bellamy watches his faint hands scrabble weakly at the dirt. His hard gaze softens a bit. There’s something endearing about the struggle. About the little white hands.

He shuffles forward on his knees to peer into the grave.

Sure enough, there he is.

He’s pale, so goddamn pale, paler than before, even. He looks frozen, his eyes standing out in a brilliant blue, the violet rope burns circling his opaque throat almost... pulsating. He’s truly a haunting sight to see.

Same nose, too.

He blinks, and looks a little less curious than before, and a little more bored.

“Help a ghoul out, would’ya?” he propositions, outstretching a kind-of-clear hand that ripples like static on a television screen. Bellamy pauses. His voice sounds... bad. It sounds broken. His windpipe, his lungs-- something’s wrong.

Fucking-- _duh._

His guilt drives him forward cautiously. Bellamy pauses between leaps to sniff for danger like a squirrel. He trembles as he makes contact with Murphy’s new skin. He expected a chill, maybe. Nothing, perhaps. A feeling like submerging yourself into cold water, or standing somewhere high up in the air. But no.

It’s warm.

He meets Murphy’s eyes as their hands wrap around each other successfully, trading heat. Murphy’s hand appears to be getting progressively hotter, but perhaps that’s just Bellamy’s own thrumming heart doing the job. The ghost’s eyes widen, he looks just as surprised.

“You can feel me,” he says mystically, almost reverently, and God, if that isn’t fucking heartbreaking.

His hands are definitely getting hotter.

“Murphy,” Bellamy says. Murphy nods vigorously, he’s listening.

“Murphy,” Bellamy says again. Oh God, oh, hell, ouch, Christ-- “Murphy, calm down.”

Murphy’s eyes dart wildly between Bellamy’s. “I am calm,” he insists, as his transparent hair begins to rise from its ends and float like seaweed, and the hairs on Bellamy’s arms stand up, electricity crackling around them in jagged circles, heat, heat, heat--

Oh- oh, _fuck!_ Bellamy tears his hand away with a gasp, and is met with weak resistance, like Murphy had no intentions of letting him go, but wasn’t strong enough to hold him.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry! I don’t-” Murphy rambles, voice muffled and panicked, as his hands claw more viciously at the grass, which turns black under his touch and hisses like dying snakes. The wind whips Bellamy’s clothes and shoves him around where he stands, until he is forced to kneel and clutch the ground. “What’s wrong with me?!” Murphy wails, and his voice no longer sounds like his own.

“It’s okay!” Bellamy shouts over the wind and the electric current, the sound of burning grass. He’s working himself up into a tragedy, a blazing fire. “Quit freaking out, we can- you’re- it’s alright!”

“It’s not!” Murphy cries out, and the voice sounds like an intercom when he shrieks "I'm dead! I'm dead!", like it’s coming from... from everywhere. “You can see me, you can _feel_ me!” His voice breaks off and smothers like he’s looking down. He kicks something hard covered in something soft, it sounds like a set of ribs. “Get me out of here!”

Bellamy edges forward and dips into the grave, bats Murphy’s outstretched flaming hands away and hauls him up by his sides. Murphy kicks his feet against the dirt wall and helps, crawling out desperately. They collapse in the grass, Bellamy’s chest heaving and hair standing on end, Murphy flickering in and out of existence, his face and limbs rearranging on their own, his chest still. They stare up at the sky and try to keep it together. Breathe, remember to breathe, Bellamy thinks.

 

Murphy probably doesn’t think the same.

 

* * *

 

“Ghosts have unfinished business,” he says matter-of-factly, and picks at his teeth with a fingernail even though he hasn’t eaten and will never eat again. Force of habit. “Everyone knows that.”

Bellamy clenches his jaw on the other side, sitting hunched over on a crate across the tent, as far away as possible. Murphy’s sprawled out over mats and furs like he owns the place, head propped up on a hand as he lies like Rose DeWitt Bukater and expects to be drawn like one of Bellamy’s French ghouls.

“You gonna contribute to the conversation or just keep ogling me? Take a picture, it’ll last longer,” Murphy snarks, collapsing with a bratty huff and staring up at the canvas above them.

“What’s yours?” Bellamy says, voice hoarse from disuse. Or screaming like a little girl. The former sounds better.

Murphy’s lip curls. “Huh?”

“Your unfinished business?”

The not-boy chuckles. “Trying to get rid of me already? All you men are the same.”

Bellamy frowns, fingers knitted together. He knits his brows and stares down at his hands. “This is so fucked up.”

Murphy snorts, and then says, because of course he does, “Thought it was a little fucked up when I got executed for no reason, but yeah, this is pretty wacky too.”

Bellamy opens his mouth to protest, but Murphy cuts him off with a wag of his finger.

“I mean, who likes getting haunted? I sure wouldn’t. After all, murdering your friends is exhausting work, right?” he prompts, glancing Bellamy’s way and feigning cheeriness. The tent gets warmer.

“You know what you deserve? A night of sound, guiltless rest,” he muses, tapping his chin as electricity inches along Bellamy’s arms, and the little white hands come up his throat. He’s dizzy, he’s sick. “In fact, maybe I’ll mosey on up to the pearly gates and have my old pal the Lord himself wipe your memory, so you never have to think about what you did to me! That sounds fair, doesn’t it?” he carries on, and pantomimes a sincere smile that turns into a sneer almost immediately. The other man watches his fluttering hair and and rising clothes.

Bellamy’s face is wet.

He’s crying. That’s what this is. And he doesn’t move, or make a sound. The pain sits like a thick stone behind his ears and plugs his throat shut, and the wetness creeps from his eyes silently.

Murphy’s face falls, and then hardens.

 

He flickers out like a candle and is gone.

 

* * *

 

The movies just don’t prepare you for busting ghosts.

Bellamy used to go to screenings of old movies in the rec room on the Ark, before Octavia was born. He liked historical movies and documentaries, war films (foolishly), and sci-fis. Sometimes ghosts were endearing, bug-eyed and adorable with unassuming, self-explanatory names, like Casper the Friendly Ghost. Sometimes they were green and slimy like insects, with black needles for teeth and red orbs for eyes. Sometimes they were white fog, sheets moving soundlessly over hardwood floors, whispers on the backs of necks, spirits of loved ones kissing graveyard hands. Bellamy remembers watching every last one of them with twinkling eyes and a parted mouth, perpetual curiosity leaving him dashing off to the station’s dilapidated library to dig through pages upon charming pages of the paranormal.

The movies just don’t prepare you for busting ghosts.

He snatches a flying knife out of thin air and slots it into the pointed holster at his hip, checks over his shoulder for wandering eyes, and then listens for the ‘squick’ of ectoplasm dripping along the walls of the dropship. He crouches to wipe up the thick white liquid quickly, considers leaving just enough to make Clarke wonder what goes on in her med bay when she isn’t around, but thinks better of it and swipes up every last drop of Murphy’s manifestation. Not a euphemism. He’s heard that one enough times. Don’t laugh. Stop it.

Needless to say, Bellamy’s poltergeist was a fucking menace.

 

* * *

 

“So the wall looks fucking terrible,” Murphy muses on his right, hands tucked behind his back, although Bellamy can still see them.

Bellamy grumbles something unintelligible, arms crossed over his chest as he supervises the construction, watching delinquents bustle around like worker ants to build something considerably more puny than the impeding, gargantuan masterpiece Murphy was directing when he was right-hand-man, when he was, uh... tangible.

“Too royal to help your minions build, Rebel King?” Murphy asks. Bellamy only sneers, shoving harshly at a slightly transparent shoulder, feels his skin prickle with heat as the ghost boy laughs.

They stand in relatively comfortable silence for a few moments, before Murphy spots a kid with shaggy blond hair and a stocky stature hefting a plank of gnarled red wood to a gap in the wall. His haunting blue eyes grow ice cold as he zeroes in on the target, and suddenly his form is no more than a ripple in the eyesight, heat next to metal on a summer’s day. Bellamy follows the ripple, the heatwave, the sound of static, and tries to look inconspicuous as he slaps a hovering hammer away from Miles’ temple.

Miles turns suddenly, and their noses nearly touch as Murphy slinks away and leaves the air cold. Bellamy grins sheepishly, offering the hammer to the delinquent with an awkward crook of his raised arm.

“Need a hand?”

He hears the wind snicker as Miles-- stupid, stupid Miles-- mistakes Bellamy’s thumb for a nail.

 

* * *

 

Bellamy despises his own patience when things start going missing, when he hears fire pit talk of bruises appearing on people’s skin at night, of people feeling the sensation of being shoved when walking near trees and fire circles, of their ankles being tugged on as they climb ladders.

And there are more interesting ones, ones that he almost has the urge to congratulate the ghoul on. A dead fish on Clarke’s bed, a hole cut in the ass of Dax’s pants.

Bellamy claps a hand over his mouth and lets the laughs in his stomach turn into aches as he watches Conor attempt to eat some blackberries, each and every last one falling out of his grasp as if plucked from his fingers right before they reach his mouth. When the guy stares bewildered at the last berry sitting innocently in his palm, he attempts to throw it directly into his mouth before it can be intercepted. Mid-arc, the berry is slapped out of the sky by an invisible force, and it sits unassumingly in the dirt among the others surrounding Conor’s feet.

When the kid throws his hands into the air in exasperation and storms off, Bellamy roars.

Murphy manifests with his hands tucked in his pockets and a flattered, proud little smirk on his face. He nudges his boot around in the spilled blackberries while Bellamy laughs and laughs and laughs, and once the older man comes to his senses, he sees Murphy’s downcast eyes, his toe scuffing at the dirt, and wonders absently if ghosts can blush.

 

* * *

 

He had forgotten what cold felt like, and he swims in it, feels the smooth hands caress his arms, his back, his calves. He floats, and lets the blue tongues of the water lap the dirt off of him, will the graves out from underneath his fingernails. The water makes the usual grainy texture of his skin sleek. He feels like a heavy-set otter as he lies on his back in the water, lets goosebumps raise on his skin as the sun fails to show, fails to warm the lagoon. It’s nice to be cold, he convinces himself, teeth chattering. It’s nice.

The poltergeist often keeps him warm, usually in the worst of ways. Electricity and sweat, blood running hot from the energy pulsating off of the ghost and disturbing the molecules in everything. It is a purely scientific warmth; it’s the furthest thing from intimate. Bellamy wonders absently what the poltergeist is getting himself into back at camp, hopes that there aren’t any floating knives meandering about--

“AGH!”

Bellamy sits upright as if he’s on something solid and not putting the whole of his faith into the blue tongues of the water, and sinks like a stone, flailing. Dark water flushes his wide-open eyes and hisses into his mouth like it’s a vacuum. He splashes underwater until he can get his feet on the ground and feel slimy pebbles rolling under his toes, emerges from the water with wetness dribbling from his lips and sloshing in his ears. He quickly swipes the soaked hair from his face so that he can see, squatting into a defensive stance as his heart thrums.

Murphy stands there looking white as a ghost, eyes the size of saucers.

“AH!” he shouts again, pointing at Bellamy’s bare chest.

Bellamy looks down, and sees everything he holds near and dear floating visible in the navel-high water. “AH!” he says.

“AH!” the ghost shouts louder, finger pointing lower.

“AH!” Bellamy cries, covering himself and pointing at Murphy with his free hand, whose hair stands on end in alarm and embarrassment. His face seems to be turning blue as he flickers, waist-high in water that cannot touch him. Sparks jump along his arms.

They listen to the buzz and watch the water ripple strangely.

 _“AHH!”_ they both shout, and scramble towards the shore.

 

* * *

 

Raven comes down in a pod like a raindrop from far away and lands like a meteor up close, sparking and smoking.

Murphy looks pleased when Bellamy tears the radio out, but spends the entire walk down to the river chattering about head wounds and grounders and lions and tigers and bears oh my, about bringing the astronaut home.

Bellamy doesn’t quite want to be responsible for two ghosts.

The spirit seems quietly, secretly satisfied when Bellamy stomps back up to the downed pod and tosses the girl over his shoulder like a firefighter, carries her with them into the warmth and the safety of their little camp, lit up with fire circles and the chirping of youthful voices in the night, gossiping about the shooting star.

Murphy takes quite a liking to the mechanic who doesn’t know his name, who doesn’t know which tree they strung a boy up in.

Bellamy doesn’t think that he adores watching Murphy trail the astronaut, peering contentedly over her shoulder at wires and flares and gunpowder, grinning at all her scathing comments and flashy snark.

Bellamy likes her just fine, but also kind of wishes he hadn’t taken the stray in at all.

 

* * *

 

The storm picks the dropship up and rattles it like a rainstick.

Finn is-- he’s going to bleed out, a pincushion for that fucking grounder. Choke on his own foam, seize so hard he bashes his skull in, shove the knife through his own spine. He’s done for.

Murphy looked curious for a moment, maybe a little sickeningly anxious to have a friend of his own build. Bellamy sent him away and hasn’t seen him in hours.

When he catches wind of a blueish fog it’s in a dark corner of the ship’s second level, the layer of the cake in-between two floors of screaming and traumatizing gore, blood splattered on hands and walls. It is the safe haven between Dante’s many circles of Inferno.

He isn’t trying to be seen by Bellamy, doesn’t know Bellamy’s there, but the narrow line of his shoulders and the violet curve of his neck are clear. Murphy’s hunched over a shuffling deck of cards that would appear to be moving independently to the unseeing eye. (Bellamy doesn’t know what makes him so special.)

On the other side of the deck is a little girl, blonde hair plaited neatly, silver circles curving deep under her haunted eyes like half-moons. There is supposed to be a guard watching her. Charlotte-duty, they’ve dubbed it.

Murphy flips another card and Charlotte places down her own hand, giggles softly as Murphy’s floating hand of cards slaps against the floor in a pantomime of a temper tantrum. She’s so fucking crazy she doesn’t even realize she’s not hallucinating.

Bellamy weaves solemnly up to the third circle to be as alone as he can and cries into his hands, right in front of the fucking grounder, while the storm shakes them all like a magic 8-ball.

He is shown as much pity as a liar and a torturer and a murderer deserve apiece.

 

* * *

 

The air changes around him sometimes, gets real warm and his ears pop.

“Not now, Murphy,” he says. Six... seven? Seven rations? That would last...

“Going out to feed the duckies?” the poltergeist quips, feigning innocence as he peers over Bellamy’s shoulder into the backpack. Bellamy zips it up quick and sharp, tugs it over his shoulder and tries to tame the wild he feels in his eyes as Murphy inspects him like a medical examiner. Looks him over, up and down-- Bellamy forces down the blood rising to his cheeks and ears, and attempts to shove Murphy out of his way. But Murphy isn’t expecting that, and doesn’t have time to materialize completely to accept the push out of habit and second nature, so Bellamy gets an armful of ectoplasm for his efforts.

There is a chilling heat to putting your hand through a spirit, the feeling of sticking your limb through a shallow puddle, expecting to hit earth. This is followed without pause by the imagined gust of wind one feels when they take a step down a flight of stairs and miss their mark altogether, that breathless gap before one falls. A warm wetness, an exhale, and then nothing. It is the creation of life rearranged and patched together again, backwards and upside down.

It is exactly what death should feel like.

“You’ll die,” Murphy advises, ever-so-kindly. He wraps his arms around his stomach-- looking insecure as he watches Bellamy wipe ectoplasm off of his wrist with his special ghost goop rag and practiced nonchalance-- although there is nothing left to protect. Bellamy rolls his eyes where Murphy can’t see them, turning his back on the ghost boy and marching out of the supply tent.

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

Murphy sputters from behind him. “N-no!” he shouts, but it comes out as a squeak. His hair stands up on end almost immediately, waving like small limbs or deep sea tentacles and sparking with static. “I hate your fuckin’ guts. Why would I want _you_ with _me?”_

Bellamy shrugs, turning ahead again. “I just meant you’d like me to kick it. The rest was all your idea, Romeo.”

 

Sparks fly.

 

* * *

 

“So I just hold it on my shoulder?”

Bellamy glances as discreetly as possible past Clarke in time to see Murphy untuck his tongue from his cheek and mouth _‘So I just hold it on my shoulder?’_   mockingly as he mimes twirling his hair. Bellamy flips him the bird as he adjusts the rifle on Clarke’s shoulder with the other hand.

“Yeah, just a little higher now, that end,” he directs, and she re-positions herself. “Yeah, that’s-”

Murphy pretends to fan himself flamboyantly, rolling his eyes back like a spooked horse.

“Uh, that’s good,” Bellamy mutters, distracted by the lyrical dance show going on in the darkest part of the depot.

Clarke looks like she’s awaiting further direction. “Uh-” he says again, stupidly. He takes aim with his own weapon, lines a shot up with the target drawn on a red blanket and hung from a pipe. “Watch and learn.”

He pulls the trigger, and nothing. Again. Nothing. “Still watching,” Clarke teases. Bellamy can’t help the darkness that rises to his cheeks. He catches a deep eye roll out of the corner of his vision.

“My bullets are duds,” he says. “Try yours.”

She lines herself up with the bulls-eye, fires. Not half bad, either. Bellamy finds himself a little slack-jawed, a little rosy in the face.

“Woah,” Clarke murmurs after a moment of awed silence. “Am I crazy for feeling...” She trails off, running a hand over her forearm.

“Feeling what?” Bellamy says, trying to ignore the tingle dancing across his skin, threatening to bite.

“Electric?” she tries, turning her hand over as if she can see yellow stars sparking around her fingers.

Bellamy feels a darkness swirling in the dripping, damp corner of the depot, feels the heat coming off of Murphy’s flickering manifestation in waves, the lightning making jagged cuts in the air around their heads like crowns of thorns.

“Must be the adrenaline,” Bellamy lies. Clarke smiles, and he steps between her and the things that she cannot see.

“Keep practicing,” he says. “I need some air.”

He only hopes that Murphy will follow.

 

* * *

 

“What’s gotten into you, huh?” Bellamy presses, forcing himself into Murphy’s blackening aura, feeling sick the moment it envelops him. But he doesn’t back down.

The poltergeist looks deeply confused, like he hadn’t meant to come out here at all, like he’d planned to stay down in the dank depot and phase through Clarke again and again and again until she drowned.

“What’s gotten into _you?”_   he snaps, hair standing up like spider legs, clothes floating heavenward until the untouchable collar of his not-shirt is covering his mouth. He laughs darkly, suddenly; that laugh that sounds like it’s coming from inside you. “’Cause you’re fucking deluded if you think you’re getting into the princess’ petticoat.”

Bellamy’s face twists up unattractively as he steps out of Murphy’s smoke before he passes out. A sheen of sweat still gathers on him like a second skin-- the heat. “Real nice, Murphy,” he sneers. “Yeah, real classy. What do you care if I did, anyway?”

Murphy glowers, his opaque form sparking, working hard to become no more visible than glass. Bellamy’s too hot, this close to him. He backs up some more.

“I don’t-” Murphy starts, opening and closing his mouth like a fish. “I don’t care. I’m just fuckin’ with you, s’all.”

Bellamy clenches his jaw. “You’re a nightmare, you know that?”

Murphy’s face falls.

Why- **_CRASH!_**

**_Glass. Glass everywhere, green and white and brown. A woman’s hand, long fingernails. CRASH! Another one. Please stop. It’s loud. Please stop. “Don’t like the mess?” she says, tears in her eyes. “You think I like the mess?” Her hand trembles. “This was your idea, Johnny. Your little art project. Don’t you like the mess that Mama cleans up?” She throws another, it breaks behind him. Glass everywhere. There are no more bottles. “You’re a nightmare, you know that?” She’s crying harder now. He isn’t crying but he’s so angry he can’t breathe. Good, he thinks, despite everything Bellamy knows about asphyxiation. Good._ **

He chokes, his eyes snap open. When did he get down here? he thinks, inhaling mud. He licks his lips. Yeah, mud.

Dax lies on the ground a few feet away, Clarke is unconscious beside him, bleeding from a head wound. They lie side by side like a husband and wife, deceased. There is an ice-blue handprint circling Dax’s broken neck.

Bellamy breathes in a little more mud and closes his eyes.

He’ll just rest for a minute.

 

* * *

 

He bandages her up with the supplies from his run-away-backpack, and they nod off at the base of a tall oak with blue bark in the nighttime. Cicadas, crickets and frogs chirp while the songbirds rest, and their cacophany is nothing short of ear-piercing.

Murphy is nowhere to be seen, and Bellamy thinks he would like, microscopically, to know where the ghost who saved their lives is.

He flickers to life suddenly right before Bellamy, as if summoned, and blinks. He looks startled for a moment with his leg raised, like he’d been dragged away mid-stride, and then swallows, dropping his eyes in a way that suggests a dull hurt that goes by the name of exhaustion or shame.

“Let me go, Bellamy," the poltergeist says.

“I don’t know how,” the man answers, earnestly.

 

* * *

 

When the sickness comes around with Lincoln like flu season with a vengeance, God’s Plague 2: The Return of God’s Plague, Bellamy begins to ask Murphy more often what dying is like.

“Yes,” Murphy always answers. “It does suck as bad as you’d think.”

Bellamy grows very weary of pulling knives out of the air, and never predicted that his janitorial duties on the Ark would follow him to Earth. He mops up ectoplasm every time Murphy takes the side entrance instead of the open door, and frowns while he does so.

“But then it’s over,” Murphy explains seriously, scratching the corner of his nose. “So it’s not so bad for long.”

Jasper inquires about his secret stash of Jobi nuts regularly, insisting that everyone’s seen Bellamy talking to himself. The smart kids are saying he's traumatized, the dumb kids are saying he has imaginary friends. Bellamy thinks they're all idiots.

“Unless you’re special ‘ole me, of course,” the spirit always concludes bitterly, and strikes the man full of guilt that he thinks must be misplaced.

Murphy and Bellamy are the talk of their little ghost town.

 

* * *

 

“Enough!” Murphy roars. The lights spark, and then they go out.

Bellamy’s so goddamn fucking tired.

“Let me do what I need to do,” he snarls, face distorting strangely, like the poltergeist forgot how it was meant to be arranged. Bellamy tries to give him his privacy as the eyes on Murphy’s chin squint in focus, as his mouth melts and becomes a gaping black hole instead of a pair of lips and a set of teeth, as he tries to calm down, tries to fix himself.

Murphy’s been growing irritable these last few weeks, itching itching itching to kill something. To scratch that place that keeps his feet on the ground. The light looks good, looks close enough to taste. If Bellamy’s tired, Murphy’s flat out exhausted, point blank.

Bellamy crushes the plastic bag between his palms, wiping sweat from his forehead as Miles sleeps soundly, chest rising and falling undisturbed.

At the man’s expression of pure emptiness, Murphy drops his raised hands. His hair flutters back down to rest by his cheeks, the lights flicker back on. His face is back on right and his shirt has come down from above his head, so Bellamy looks at him.

“Your eyes are farther apart than that.”

Murphy’s eyes inch apart a little.

“Thanks.”

“And your nose is bigger.”

“Fuck off.”

It’s a weird system they have. A weird system for horrible problems.

Bellamy sighs, crumples to the ground and props himself against the ladder in the dropship.

“Are you sure you aren’t sick?” the spirit asks, uncharacteristically gentle as he slides down by Bellamy’s side. Sincere.

His stomach hurts. His breathing is labored. His head pounds. His nose aches. He’s hot and cold all at once, sweating in places no one should have to sweat. “I’m fine,” he says, sniffles. It’s a very wet sniffle. Is that blood he smells?

“Are you sure _you_ aren’t sick?” Bellamy asks. Murphy looks at him like he’s stupid. Bellamy shrugs. “You’re looking awfully pale,” he explains, peeling a bit of skin from his thumbnail during the punchline.

A look of realization crosses Murphy’s face, flickering alongside his body.

“Hardy-fuckin’-har.”

Bellamy searches his eyes as Murphy gives a tired smile and a little huff of a laugh, punches him in the arm with that featherlight touch of his.

The man’s heart pounds. He wants to kiss him. He wants to kiss a ghost. Bellamy’s going to mack on a poltergeist. He’s going to do it. He’s going to lean in and--

 

* * *

 

“Wake up.” Grunt. “Oh, wake up you big sack of shit, come on.”

Little white hands dance over his face, warm to the touch. Bellamy sees a pale blur and everything behind it, turned sideways and close to the floor to be level with him, brilliant blue eyes and a familiar pout.

“So cute,” he explains, and promptly passes out again.

 

* * *

 

The water feels good, down and down and down his throat. Tiny waterfall. It sloshes in his empty stomach, the little white hands pushed everything out.

The cup slips through the ghost’s weak grip and spills over their boots. The water seeps right through Murphy, who seems to wilt at the sensation or lack-thereof. Bellamy supposes it takes dying and getting trapped in purgatory to wish you could spill water on your own shoes.

“I’m gonna take care of Conor today. You have to let me finish it this time, alright?”

Bellamy shakes his head, hanging onto Murphy’s hot hot wrist.

“I can’t just let you kill people.”

Murphy runs a fist across his eyes like he’s capable of crying, frustrated. “And why the fuck not?” he demands, knowing the answer. “I want- I need out of this. I have to... finish my business, or whatever.” He seems to turn to steel in his resolve, suddenly, as movement catches his eye across the room. “And I’m doing it whether you like it or not. So let me go, Bellamy.”

They both know Murphy could pull his hand right out of Bellamy’s, he could go wherever he wanted.

“I can’t,” Bellamy says, shaking his head. He feels blood trickle out of his eye, only on the right. A tear. One horrible, hot tear. His arm trembles with exhaustion as he hangs onto Murphy’s wrist. “Why do you have to go?” he says, meaning to say something else entirely, something that feigns interest in Conor’s life. But that’s not exactly what comes out, is it?

Murphy chews his lip, eyes flickering from Bellamy to his target like the place must be itched, must be itched right this moment and at no other.

“Things to do, people to see.” He smiles sheepishly, looking a little pitiful, a little pleading. A deep longing is etched into his tired blue face.

Bellamy’s delirious from the sickness, from the exhaustion. “You have a mother,” he says dumbly.

The ghost nods quickly.

“And you have-”

“A father.”

Bellamy’s face falls in understanding. He swallows.

“Okay.”

Murphy quirks his brow.

“Okay,” Bellamy repeats. “Kill me.”

 

* * *

 

Murphy looks absolutely scandalized as Bellamy sways on his feet like a palm tree, tying a length of red fabric around his throat clumsily, his fingers trembling and getting caught between knots. Murphy steps forward to do it for him, solemnly, like they’re adjusting his tie for a funeral (aren’t they?), but doesn’t look like he quite understands why. Bellamy stares at the bruises pulsing violet in a ring of rose around his neck and wonders if it hurt.

“Yes, it hurts. Quit staring.”

He pushes his eyes heavenward and breathes in deeply, but his long draw of breath is cut short by his seat-belt bow tie. He goes for trial run number two with lower expectations, inhales more shallowly. It works, and he feels lightheaded almost immediately, like someone whispered in his ear and left their air to knock around inside his head. Breathe. Breathe. Remember to breathe.

“Okay, ready,” he says. It sounds ridiculous, like he’s going down a water slide at a theme park. It sounds like a blatant, childish lie.

Murphy sighs, crossing his arms. “This is stupid.”

“Do you want to do your business or not?”

“Don’t say it like that.”

“Would you just cooperate?”

“I’m not going to kill you, Bellamy.”

“Then what do you want?”

“To not be in this room. Just let me leave.”

Bellamy tosses his hands up. “I don’t know how! Every time I think of you, you’re here! Don’t you fucking get it? I’m not enjoying this either! I don’t want- fuck! Christ, Murphy! I don’t want to see you like this, I don’t want you to see me like this!”

_**The frostbite gets you first, turns your face blue and cold as your blood depressurizes and your lungs rupture. Your skin will burn and bruise until you look like the deeply loved creation of a broken child. The floor of the airlock is cold on his knees. There is a mouth open and filling up with stars, a body stretched out like a starfish in the dark. Bellamy can’t imagine where it will go. He thinks back to a few moments ago, of flattening his hands and face against the glass and watching his father plead and grovel, on his knees before the Chancellor. Out of the corner of his glassy eye his father sees something that stops him in his tracks, his intertwined fingers frozen mid-beg in air. “Go,” he says. “Get out of here, John.” Bellamy shakes his head, no, no no no. Don’t send me away. I love you. I’ll never love anything again if you do this to me. “I don’t want you to see me like this.” And then his open mouth is full of stars. Bellamy wonders what they taste like...** _

_“STOP!”_

Murphy’s halfway through the fucking ceiling.

“I’m sorry! I’m sorry!”

 _“Stop,”_ Bellamy rasps out again, stupidly, clutching his ears, hunched over on the floor. He doesn’t think he has any more water in his body to cry out. _“Please, stop.”_ It’s over, but he still begs. He can't breathe with this thing around his neck, he knows that's the whole fucking point. He pulls at it fruitlessly anyway.

Murphy’s halfway through the fucking ceiling and scrabbling to hang onto a pipe, an exposed wire, something. Electricity cracks through the air like a whip and ignites Bellamy’s mortal veins, sets his skin aflame like it’s tissue paper. Their hair swims, bathed in fluorescent light, their clothes reach for the moon.

“Give a ghoul a hand, would’ya?” Murphy whimpers, flickering hard and fast as he tries to be a human, tries to trick the inner workings of the ship into thinking that he’s made of skin and bone so it’ll spit him out.

Bellamy crawls until he feels he can stand and outstretches a hand to Murphy, pulls him down from the sky and close to his chest. He’s almost too warm to touch, and Bellamy worries he may come out of this with something-degree burns, but their eyes are wild, Murphy’s slipping off his goddamn face, their hair is flying and the room is an electrical fire hazard. Chaos swims between Bellamy’s ears.

“What do you need?”

Murphy looks at Bellamy’s lips and then his eyes and then looks at the wall like he wants to jump through it, run far far far away, run to a place where Bellamy doesn’t think of him and doesn’t have to eat his fucking memories every time the poltergeist’s feelings get hurt.

“I need you to let me kill them.”

“I can’t do that.”

Murphy closes his eyes like he was expecting the blow but it still bruises.

“I’ve seen you with Charlotte. You don’t want to kill her.”

Murphy looks offended by this, as if Bellamy had just admitted to watching him while he showers and collecting strands of his hair.

“If you were after everybody who hurt you, wouldn’t you want to kill her?”

He at least pretends to look thoughtful. Bellamy considers it a small victory until he opens his mouth.

“So why should I kill _you?”_

Bellamy scratches the back of his neck and feels sweat collect underneath his fingernails. It’s warm, very warm, don’t you think?

“I killed you.”

Murphy narrows his eyes and takes a step back. “Is this a fucking game to you?” he accuses, pointing a finger. One of his eyes travels further and further down his face as he forgets to keep himself looking human. He looks like a snowman left out in the sun. “You think people just go around committing team homicide? Is that how you and your friends typically end slumber parties, huh? Or am I just special?”

Bellamy wrinkles his nose, feeling a little defensive himself. The noose around his neck feels more like an accessory than a weapon, he's nearly forgotten it's there as veins pop out in his neck and forehead, and he strains to shout back. “You’re taking an awfully high road in spite of the revenge spree you’ve been kicking and screaming to get started on, yeah Murph?” He stomps onto his crate, works at tying the end of the noose to a pipe overhead. When it’s secure he looks down at the blackness spreading to drag its tongues along his ankles menacingly; dead snakes.

Murphy smiles up from his fog, it’s soft and malleable, it’s cold. “You’re a coward, Bellamy.”

“Kill me.”

“No.”

“Kill me, if you’re so brave. Put us both out of our fucking misery.”

“It’s not what I need.”

“Kill m-” he stops. His blood runs cold. “What?”

Murphy blinks. He looks sad, something like tears pooling in those brilliant blue opaque eyes.

“What did you say?”

A white, blurry tear falls in a jagged, unnatural pattern from Murphy’s eye. “It’s not what I need,” he says, and he climbs up onto the crate next to Bellamy, who feels his heel slip on the other end. He grabs Murphy’s hip to hang on. They’re chest-to-chest, nose-to-nose.

“What, you need something stupid? Need to feel the magic of friendship, or some other bullshit? Huh?” Bellamy insists. “Here, I’m your fucking friend,” he growls, wrapping Murphy in a scorching hug that’s anything but friendly.

Murphy mumbles a negative into Bellamy’s shoulder.

His skin is burning. It’s-- no, it’s really, _really_ burning.

“You never been loved?” Bellamy says, and he’s crying now. His tears are nothing but a translucent red. So fucking warm. “Is that it?” he hisses, voice breaking. "Here," he sobs, "I fucking love you!" He lunges forward to smash his lips against Murphy’s in a bruising kiss that burns his mouth, a kiss that’s anything but loving. Murphy doesn't respond, just shakes, crying static.

 _“Answer me!”_   Bellamy screams.

The overhead lights crackle and spit sparks, flicker out, and they are shrouded in complete darkness.

“Kill me, Murphy,” Bellamy begs, quieter now, choking on his own sobs. He drops his head miserably to the poltergeist's hot hot shoulder, trembling, salty, bloody tears running into his mouth. “Kill me,” he pleads, crying so hard he couldn’t see if there was any light at all. “I killed you.”

They let the crickets sing, and then the wind sighs knowingly, like it has a secret that Bellamy has never heard. The ghost pulls him impossibly closer atop their wobbling crate.

"Kill me," the man murmurs against his poltergeist's neck, one last time, eyes squeezed closed.

 

The ghost just holds him harder. "What do you say we get out of here?"

He nods, but they don't come down from the crate for a long time.

Bellamy listens for the breath of his only friend and hears nothing. 

 

* * *

 

It’s an hour that doesn’t exist, something between dusk and dawn but not quite either one. The cicadas and the crickets and the frogs are finally asleep, and the songbirds have not woken yet either. It’s silent.

Dead silent.

“I’ve never looked better,” the poltergeist says, looking down into the hole.

Bellamy’s nose is bleeding. He peers into the grave and sees rotting flesh and maggot-covered bone. Little white hands. “Gross,” Murphy agrees, relenting.

They stare at it a little while longer, watching a worm explore the wide circle where Murphy’s eye used to be. At least someone’s having fun.

“Well,” ghost Murphy quips, smacking his lips. “This is anti-climactic.”

He kicks a little bit of dirt into the grave.

“Your turn,” he says.

Bellamy doesn’t want to.

Murphy gives him a little nudge, tossing an arm over his shoulder. “You see, Bellamy, I’m very, very dead.” He gestures widely to the hole full of bugs. “And I know that I’m so cute and charming and that you’re completely obsessed with me--”

Bellamy crosses his arms.

“But it’s time to let go,” Murphy says. “You did what you thought you had to do, and in this world, when people leave, they don’t come back-”

The human’s lip quivers a little, and he can’t help but interrupt. “You forgive me?”

The ghost boy looks up at the man thoughtfully. “No.” He turns his gaze back toward the hole. “That was a stupid question. Pay attention, I’m bringing you closure.”

He kicks another little anthill of red dirt into the grave.

“Anyway,” he says. “Back to my motivational speech. In this world, people don’t come back, _yadayadayadah_ , got it?”

Bellamy wipes his cupid’s bow and thumbs the blood onto Murphy’s shirt. It stays on his skin entirely, but Murphy swats him away anyhow, catching Bellamy’s hand. He turns and plants warm hands on Bellamy’s cheeks, and kisses him softly.

“Maybe in the next one we can try again?” Bellamy murmurs against a foggy excuse for lips, tingling with electricity as their hair stands up on end. He feels kind of pathetic for asking. Murphy nods, though, eyes closed.

“I was gonna say that. Swear.”

Yeah, Bellamy thinks. Okay.

Murphy pulls away.

“Get some rest,” Bellamy instructs.

Murphy nods, flexing his fingers. “Yeah, you too.”

Bellamy holds onto him for a breath.

“Alright,” the poltergeist says, smiling a little sadly. “Help a ghoul out, would'ya?"

“Yeah,” the human says, finally. “Okay.”

Murphy salutes him, and Bellamy unfurls his fingers, and he lets go.

  
He flickers out like a candle, and is gone.

 

* * *

 

“Tell the ghost story,” Madi insists, adjusting the daisies lying on the dirt.

Bellamy finishes carving the “Y” into the stone in his lap, and scratches at his beard, thinking.

“Alright,” he says. Madi takes the new, bigger headstone from him and works it into the dirt, eyes bright as she listens with rapt attention. “There was a spaceman,” he begins.

 

* * *

 

He wakes up after what feels like a lifetime.

(Bellamy knows a little bit about the fundamentals of death.)

Gold and white are forgotten as he pushes at the gate constructed of bundles of pearls, and wide, view-obstructing tangerine clouds fade into pictures of things people want to have, places people want to be, people people want to see. He wonders if he's dead.

And suddenly he doesn’t remember where he is at all, as miles and miles and miles of books and papers, encyclopedias and parchment peer down to inspect him like he’s a fascinating little bug under a glass. The only library he’s seen that was this big was the one on the station in space, the one that was really only the size of a house surrounding a very, very small Bellamy.

“You’re a filthy cheater,” a voice accuses. Bellamy points to his chest, bewildered and feeling accosted, turns in circles on his heel until he sees a round table full of heads next to a tilting bookcase with a bright yellow label that reads, ‘Paranormal Fiction’.

There are two young men, one with dark skin and a shaved head, pouting lips. He smirks as he knocks one of the other boy’s checkers off of the board and it clacks against the metal floor. There is an older man with spiky, dirty-blond hair and a sharp nose, chuckling with the whole of his stomach. Two women: one in a red sweatshirt, holding a cocktail between her thumb and forefinger. Her smile is wide, she seems to light up a room. Her eyes are a brilliant blue. And the other woman, in a blue sundress with choppy brown hair. She turns; a quieter, gentler, more thoughtful expression on her freckled face. Her eyes are a deep mahogany. She is much more familiar looking than the others, she is a face that Bellamy thinks he will remember.

The first boy leans over, laughing about something, to retrieve his red checker. When he comes up, he sees Bellamy, who feels like he should cover himself. _You’re naked!_ his brain cries. _No,_ Bellamy tries to rationalize, but the wailing continues until the boy is a foot in front of him.

“Oh, thank God,” he says. “You have no idea how bored I’ve been.”

And then he laughs. It’s gruff, thick. Hoarse yet nasal. It’s familiar.

“M-” he tries. He swallows. “Murphy?” he says stupidly.

 

“Yeah,” the spirit says, grinning against the streams of sunlight that are too grand to be real. “I’m just as surprised as you are.”

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> this might be the darkest thing i've ever written and it was supposed to be entirely comedy i don't know what happened i was possessed. haha ghost joke
> 
> i know this was all very ominous and confusing and ambiguous and i would be elated to answer any questions about murphy's ghostliness because i did a lot of poltergeist research for this fic and butchered every last bit of it 
> 
> thank u so much for reading <33 love u


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